Joel Manfredo, CIO of Orange County, gave a presentation focused on green IT and what IT organizations will need to do in the future. The most striking thing about Manfredo's presentation: While leading cloud data centers operate at around 1.2 [Power Usage Effectiveness] (Manfredo is skeptical of the 1.07 announced by Facebook as part of its ), the average corporate data center has a 2.5 PUE. Manfredo's own data center is currently running at 1.77 PUE. Of course, energy represents only around 25 percent of total data center costs; administration represents around 50 percent of costs.

One constant theme in the end-user heavy Business of Cloud Computing conference was the ongoing battle for financial resources. One participant, who works for a highly profitable consumer products company, shared the experience that a request to replace fifteen year-old desktops was denied with the rationale "if it hasn't broken yet, it's probably good enough to go for another year." (This may have been hyperbole on his part, although it seemed like systems were used well past their sell-by date at his firm.) It was quite interesting to contrast this situation with the one Phillipott outlined, where he has been able to obtain sufficient resources to enable investment with the end goal of reducing total spend.

The Structure 2011 event, by contrast, was like fast-forwarding to the future. The developments in cloud computing--and, more importantly, in cloud-based applications--are breathtaking. Presentations by various cloud service providers indicate that they are preparing for a future in which they will play a predominant role in IT deployment. A number of small, early-stage companies described approaches to computing that promise dramatic change in application development and configuration.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, cited a couple of striking facts during his "State of the Cloud" keynote. The first was that Amazon Web Services' [AWS] S3 storage service contained, at the end of Q1 2011, 339 billion objects. S3 contained 212 billion objects at the end of Q4 2010, so the service grew by 29 percent in one quarter. I think that represents a 176 percent compounded annual growth rate, which at the large numbers we're talking about is absolutely staggering. It's obvious that people are beginning to treat S3 as the world's largest external drive, with new use cases springing up on a daily basis.